Last May, the provincial government announced it was cancelling a desperately needed and long-awaited new courthouse for Halton. The modern and consolidated Oakville building was to replace aging and inadequate courthouses in Milton and Burlington. It was announced in 2017 -- after "countless years of lobbying, negotiation and planning," according to the local law association -- and cancelled shortly before construction was set to begin.
We wanted to know how much it cost Infrastructure Ontario to cancel the project.
We asked the Ministry of the Attorney General. The ministry declined to say.
We wanted to ask Effie Triantafilopoulos, our Oakville North-Burlington MPP who serves as vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Justice Policy. But she didn't respond to our request for an interview.
We asked Infrastructure Ontario informally and were told we needed to file a Freedom of Information request. Yesterday, we received a response to that request.
Apparently it is not in the economic interest of Ontario for us to know how much it cost not to build a courthouse.
